ABSTRACT
Cultural and social anthropology, even in the modern era, had matured in opposition to both genetic and evolutionary influences. The whole enterprise of worldwide ethnography had proven that culture, not genes, was what was needed to explain the differences in human behavior observed among different people. Contrary to what the postmodernists and other anti-Darwinians claimed, this did not involve diminishing human beings in the eyes of philosophy. It involved in the first place elevating animals to the place they deserved to have in behavioral science and, second, looking squarely at ourselves, not with a jaundiced, but with an honest eye. Indeed, in retrospect, Tiger and Fox had proposed an unprecedentedly radical program for social science: get ideology out of the way. It was unprecedented because almost all prior social science had been motivated by something resembling Karl Marx's dictum, carved into his massive Hyde Park gravestone: Philosophers have only tried to interpret the world in various ways.
